Obama On Tax Cuts: President Rejects Republican Plan To Close Loopholes [View all]

Source: Huffington Post

WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama has rejected an idea put forward by House Speaker John Boehner and other Republicans to close unspecified tax loopholes in order to pay for extending all tax cuts as part of a deal to avoid the so-called fiscal cliff. Obama's simple explanation: I won.

"But when it comes to the top 2 percent, what I'm not going to do is to extend further a tax cut for folks who don't need it, which would cost close to a trillion dollars. And it's very difficult to see how you make up that trillion dollars, if we're serious about deficit reduction, just by closing loopholes and deductions," the president said at a White House news conference on Wednesday. "The math tends not to work," he said.

He then pivoted to the campaign. "If there was one thing that everybody understood, that was a big difference between myself and Mr. Romney, it was when it comes to how we reduce our deficit, I argued for a balanced, responsible approach -- and part of that included making sure that the wealthiest Americans pay a little bit more," he said. "By the way, more voters agreed with me on this issue than voted for me."

"The only question now is, are we going to hold the middle class hostage in order to go ahead and let that happen?" said Obama.